Poetry Sunday: Away above a Harborful... by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, beat poet, playwright, publisher, and free speech activist died last week at the age of 101. As a publisher, perhaps his crowning achievement was to publish Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems in 1956. He also helped other beat writers such as Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs to reach readers. Ferlinghetti's most famous collection of poems was A Coney Island of the Mind which was published in 1958.

Here is one of his poems from an earlier collection, These Are My Rivers, published in 1955. I thought it was a good example of the jazzy rhythms and earthy imagery of so many of his poems. I hope you enjoy it.

Away above a Harborful . . .

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Away above a harborful

                                              of caulkless houses   

among the charley noble chimneypots

                  of a rooftop rigged with clotheslines   

             a woman pastes up sails

                                          upon the wind

hanging out her morning sheets

                                             with wooden pins

                                  O lovely mammal

                                             her nearly naked breasts   

                        throw taut shadows

                                             when she stretches up   

to hang at last the last of her

                                              so white washed sins   

                  but it is wetly amorous

                                                   and winds itself about her   

                     clinging to her skin

                                                   So caught with arms   

                                                                               upraised   

            she tosses back her head

                                              in voiceless laughter   

    and in choiceless gesture then

                                                 shakes out gold hair

while in the reachless seascape spaces

                           between the blown white shrouds   

         stand out the bright steamers

                                                to kingdom come